Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/277

 motionless, until she was suffocated by the smoke, or overthrown by the fall of heavy logs of wood, previously attached with cords to posts placed at the four corners of the pile. It is said that in certain provinces the victim was intoxicated with opium beforehand. Sometimes also, proper precautions not having been taken, it happened that she rushed madly out of the flames, and was then brutally thrust back by the spectators.

These frightful customs, which have hardly yet disappeared from India, are but survivals from the times of savagery: such brutalities were habitual in a number of primitive societies, as I have previously shown.

In the Koran, in the Bible, and among the Arabs, or rather the contemporaneous Islamites, we find nothing analogous to this; but the position given to the widow is none the less unenviable.

A verse of the Koran shows us that before the time of Mahomet, sons inherited all their father's wives as a matter of course, in African fashion: "Thou shalt not marry the women who have been thy father's wives; it is an abomination and a bad practice." We have seen that this most gross custom, against which Mahomet inveighs, still prevails in various countries, and especially amongst the negroes of tropical Africa. It must have been general at the time of Mahomet, even amongst the Arabs, since the prophet states that his law need not have any retrospective effect: "Let that remain," proceeds the same verse, "which has already been done."

There is one point, however, on which the Koran is in advance of the greater number of barbarous societies, and even of the Bible. It recognises, in fact, the right of a widow to inherit from her husband; this right gives her a fourth, if there is no child, and an eighth only in the contrary case. But notwithstanding this the widow was often abandoned, or, what is worse, confounded with the heritage. The Bible was less kind to the widow. It specifies indeed that the fortune of the husband is security for the personal effects and the dowry of the wife, but it does not place her among her husband's heirs. The Jewish